Max woke early the next morning feeling nearly as rested as he had the first time he opened his eyes in the sea of poppies. Using a few flames and then the dim light of early morning coming from the end of the hall, he made his way down to the chamber with the submerged stairs. He cupped hands in the water and drew a mouthful toward his face. It looked clear, so he brought it to his lips. Finding it crisp and almost sweet, he filled his stomach to help drown the hunger pains that had gripped him as soon as he’d opened his eyes.
After he had splashed water on his face and over his arms and chest in an attempt to sluice away the days of the grime that clung to his body, he crouched on the stone landing and watched the surface of the water grow still again. In the gloomy light he couldn’t quite see his own features, but the soft glow of the brightling by his side shone with a steady, comforting brilliance.
“Ready to go hunting, little one?”
—
Max stood at the entrance to his hideaway scanning the silent undergrowth for signs of movement. When he saw nothing, he slipped as quietly as he could out of the hole, trying not to disturb the wilted foliage that camouflaged the entrance. He picked his way carefully across the ground, then paused after he’d gone only a few dozen feet. He turned back to look at his hideaway, then turned in a slow circle, trying to commit landmarks to memory.
The hole he’d fallen through the day before was at the top of a shallow hill. The collapsed tunnel leading away from the mosaic room had created a depression in the ground nearby. Up in the first canopy, the highest branch of the nearest tree had a broken limb that pointed straight down. Above that, an ancient tree that stretched up to the highest canopy had a forked trunk that formed an almost perfect “V.”
“I’ll try to walk in a straight line,” Max said, “but if I get us lost, you might have to get us home.”
The brightling tilted its head to look up at him.
“Great,” Max said. “Off we go, then.”
Max stood, put his back to the hideaway’s entrance, and set off.
Max was determined to strike first in his next encounter with one of the jungle’s monsters–hopefully one of the tentacle monsters, since that was the only thing he knew he could eat. He stopped frequently to listen for signs of movement as he made his way through the undergrowth. When he heard nothing, he scanned the bushes and trees and vines for any indication that he was about to walk into–or onto, or under–something deadly but innocuous looking. The wounds left by the deadly trees in the orchard had healed long before the wound in his stomach, but he had no desire to collect additional punctures, even if he did heal with shocking speed. So he looked and listened and when he felt reasonably satisfied that he wasn’t blundering into a hazard, he pushed a few dozen feet through the undergrowth and paused again to assess his path.
As he went, Max found himself admiring the silent jungle. Even as he devoted most of his attention to spotting creatures that would likely attack him on sight, he couldn’t help but lose himself occasionally in the arresting beauty of the jungle’s plant life. While the flowers where Max had first fallen into the jungle were an almost uniform yellow, here the flowers hanging from trees or erupting from bushes appeared in every color and shape Max could imagine. Vines with leaves almost as intricate as flowers wreathed the trunks of ancient trees. The trees themselves, massive pillars with smooth, impenetrable looking bark, or gnarled survivors that twisted in search of the sun, impressed on him the vast age of the jungle.
But the silence hanging over the place was still unnerving. As he walked Max could hear his own breath and the snap and crunch of forest detritus underfoot. It felt off, uncanny. He couldn’t shake the conviction that a jungle ought to feel livelier. A jungle should be screaming with life and this place felt wrong, arrested, empty. But of course it wasn’t. At least not entirely. It was full of monsters that wanted to kill him and he was convinced they were listening to all of his clumsy attempts to avoid stepping on sticks and twigs. He needed to go slowly and quietly if he wanted to find something to eat without first watering the jungle floor with his insides.
But going slowly didn’t help much with the heat. He hadn’t been walking long before he had worked up a sweat. Soon he was soaked head to toe.
Stopping next to a massive white tree with roots that rose up out of the forest floor like frozen waves, he crouched and wiped at the sweat on his forehead.
“I think it’s hotter today,” he whispered. “Much hotter. This is…this is awful.”
Max watched the jungle as he had during each of his stops that morning, but still nothing moved. He settled himself carefully on a root and tried to swallow the frustration that had been growing along with his hunger pains.
He thought back to his encounter with the leafy tentacle monster by the ravine. Maybe he hadn't just stumbled upon it. Maybe it had come when he'd drawn attention to himself by shouting at the sky like a mad person. Or maybe it had just been dumb luck that he'd thrown a rock and hit something.
“I can’t kick every bush and check under every leaf,” Max said. “I don’t want to start shouting in case that brings a swarm of them to me. Might as well throw a few rocks and see if we can flush something out.”
Max wiped at his forehead again.
“That slingshot you showed me would be helpful.”
Knowing that his companion rarely responded to his banter, Max had stopped looking to the brightling for responses as he spoke, but when from the corner of his eye he saw the creature stand, he turned and gave the golden animal his full attention. He watched as it stood, twitched one ear, and cocked its head slightly. Max caught his breath, waiting hopefully for the musical sound that came when the brightling offered him a boon. He let the breath go when the brightling shook itself vigorously and sat back on his haunches.
Max looked at it evenly. “Very funny.”
Max scanned the ground nearby for large stones. One he dug from between his own feet. Another he pulled from the loose dirt under the brightling’s left front paw. “Excuse me, little jokester.”
Max hefted one rock in his right hand, rehearsing in his mind the smooth action required to throw a stone into the undergrowth and then get his hand up in time to throw fire.
“Ok,” he said. “Easy enough.”
He took a deep breath, stood with his back square to the tree, then hurled the stone in a high arc out into the jungle. He had his arm up and ready by the time the stone came down. It fell with the sound of shredding leaves before thudding faintly into the earth. He waited, but the forest remained silent and still.
He let his arm fall to his side.
“Nothing over there...”
Max turned to his left and let the second stone fly. It disappeared into the jungle and landed with a faint splash.
“And nothing over there.”
Max stood for a few moments in the quiet, sweltering jungle. He felt foolish. Maybe the forest wasn’t actually teeming with monsters and he didn’t need to be sneaking and creeping the way he was. If it had just been his bad luck to run into two monsters as soon as he arrived, and if the rest of the jungle was largely empty, it was probably going to take real effort to find his next meal. More effort than a few haphazardly thrown stones.
Obviously. What a stupid idea.
Max sat back down on the tree root and stared out at the jungle, trying to imagine what a more effective hunting strategy might look like.
Nothing in this place made noise that he could follow from a distance. He might sit still to wait and ambush something that wandered by, but he hadn’t seen anything roaming through the trees. The only monsters he’d found were the bird that had appeared when the orchard fruit started exploding, and the tentacle monster that he’d hit with a rock. They didn’t seem to be patrolling territory. What if he wasted a day sitting by himself, his hunger and his thirst getting worse by the minute?
What else, what else, what else…
What if he didn’t need to wait in any particular place? What if he could set traps?
Max sat up a little straighter. He could build traps of some kind and leave them in different places. He could cover a lot more ground that way, and he wouldn’t have to just sit in one place and hope something wandered by. He could, effectively, sit in multiple places and wait for things to wander by all of them.
Ok. This is a better idea. Traps.
Max looked down at his empty hands.
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How do I build a trap? A pit, maybe? A snare? A tripwire?
Max tried to conjure mental images of traps. Any kind of trap. He knew what a pit trap looked like, of course–it was just a hole in the ground–but how did he convince something to fall into it? And how did he keep it there once it had fallen in? He imagined a green tentacle monster falling into a hole he managed to dig–somehow…with his bare hands?–only for it to stab its tentacles into the earthen walls of the pit and drag itself back out.
A tripwire might be better. A snare of some kind. How do I do that?
Max sat on the white root in the middle of a silent jungle, thinking, thinking, but nothing came to him. Instead of remembering, he was wrestling with the now familiar despair that came with confronting the strange mental emptiness that had haunted him since he woke up in a sea of ruby red wild flowers. He had no idea how to build an effective snare. Maybe he never did. Maybe, like jungles, he’d just heard about them from a person he had also forgotten.
I could still try. Maybe I can invent my own kind of snare.
Max stood and looked up into the branches of the lower canopy.
I could use vines, a few branches–
Allowing himself to be carried away by his own enthusiasm, desperate for forward motion as much as anything else, Max scanned the canopy above. Seeing a promising length of vine that looped and bunched over a long branch, he aimed at it with his ring hand, palm-first.
“If I hit it there and there,” he muttered to himself, “that’ll probably be enough to…”
He didn’t know how to finish that thought. He didn’t know what he was going to do with a coil of green vine covered in conical purple flowers. He didn’t even know if he could aim well enough to hit the upper end of the vine so that it would fall where he could reach it. But he was going to try.
I’ll experiment.
Fire leapt into his palm. At the last moment he hesitated, then shifted his aim to the tree branch that supported the coil of vine. If he could shake the branch it might knock the vine loose, but if he could bring the whole branch down he would have even more material to…
More material to work with. More material to help me find something to eat.
With a little push of his palm, Max let the fire bolt streak toward the forest canopy. It hit the branch exactly where he’d hoped, and the base of the branch exploded, sending the branch, flaming splinters, and the vine he coveted down toward the ground. They were still in the air when a familiar shriek echoed through the forest from Max’s left.
He whirled toward the noise and saw a green tentacle monster raise itself up out of a thicket. It came from the direction of the first rock he’d thrown, but it was dozens of feet farther away than he’d been able to send a rock with just the strength of his arm.
It saw him immediately and surged forward with another shriek. Max stared at it, heart pounding, as it stabbed green limbs into the ground to pull itself forward, crashing through the undergrowth. Then he came back to himself.
Max’s first firebolt hit it on the right side, but the monster had twisted at the last moment and some of Max’s flame had flared harmlessly into empty air. The rest seemed to wrap around a translucent blue sphere that flared into life and faded again when the fire had gone out.
He remembered a similar blue light flaring into view when he killed the tentacle monster the day before. All of these leafy monsters appeared to enjoy similar protections.
But no brightling. And no fire. Just their horrible, delicious tentacles.
Max gathered fire into his hand again, intending to shower bolts down onto the thing as quickly as possible. If the monster could partially avoid his fire, he wanted to get off as many shots as he could before the monster got anywhere near him. And it was coming quickly.
Max was already gathering fire into his palm for a third strike when his second fire bolt took the monster squarely in the center of its mass of tentacles. The blue sphere flashed fully into view, but was quickly obscured when the fire bolt exploded into an orange cloud directly against the monster. With a strangled shriek, the creature collapsed.
Max waited a moment for the monster to get back on its feet and continue its charge, but when it stayed down he felt a quick surge of triumph.
“Ha!”
Max’s fierce elation cooled as the monster released its death shriek. He watched as the sound became a bubble of force that echoed up into the lower canopy and out into the jungle. It was quickly answered by two cries coming from opposite directions.
“Ok, then,” Max said. “Better collect breakfast before its friends get here.”
Max stopped. The tentacle monster had fallen out of sight and in his excitement he’d lost track of where, specifically, it lay.
“No, no, no,” he muttered. “Where’d it fall, little one?”
Beside him, the brightling chimed and a thin pillar of golden light shot up from the bushes. It stood there, wavering like a thin plume of smoke rising through undisturbed air, marking exactly the place, Max realized, where the monster had fallen.
Max looked down at the creature. Its eyes were shining.
“So you can find them?”
When the screams echoed through the forest again, Max turned away from his glowing companion and pushed into the undergrowth. He moved as quickly as he could on bare feet now that he knew the nearest monster was dead and charred. The brightling kept pace.
When Max found the monster collapsed on its side, its tentacles were still smoking. The sight as well as the smell, now that he knew the thing was edible, made his mouth water.
“Ok, little one,” Max said, gesturing at the monster. “Go on.”
The monster began to implode immediately and sparkling green dust streamed into the brightling. When it had all gone, Max stooped and pushed the remaining tentacles into a neat pile. He winced as he bundled them close to his chest and hot pulp from one tentacle scalded his bare skin. Gritting his teeth but refusing to drop any leaves the way he had the day before, he turned back toward the tree that sat along the imaginary line leading back to his hideaway.
By the time he made it back to the tree, the monsters screaming through the jungle in his direction sounded like they were nearly on top of him. Heart pounding, he looked around for a place to hide. He saw nothing but shrubs and the white tree.
Behind the tree. Maybe if they go right to where the tentacle monster fell, I can put the tree between us.
He slipped around the massive white trunk of the tree, trying to hear over his own ragged breath whether the monsters had turned in his direction. On the other side of the tree he pressed himself to the smooth bark of the tree and listened.
Moments later, the monsters converged on the spot where he’d just been standing. Max wondered if the creatures would lash out at each other, but they simply called out one final time, in anger, or warning, or maybe grief, and grew quiet.
The silence that followed was unsettling.
“Where are they, little one?” Max whispered, looking down at the brightling sitting by his left foot.
When the creature looked up at him impassively, Max sighed.
“You can only find them when they’re dead?”
The brightling made a small, discrete chirping noise in its throat.
“Great.”
Slowly, as quietly as he could, and still holding his breakfast tightly to his chest, Max slipped around the edge of the tree to peek at the creatures that had just arrived.
The bird he recognized immediately. As it circled the place where the tentacle monster had fallen, the vibrant blue feathers on the underside of each wing flashed in and out of view. Though he knew it would try to kill him if it could, Max couldn’t help admiring its grace and the stark beauty of its coloring.
The other creature he couldn’t see immediately. Panicking, he whirled to check the jungle on the other side of the tree, but when he couldn’t see anything creeping up on him, he turned back to the bird. As it continued to circle, Max scanned the bushes below it, trying to determine where a green tentacle monster might be hiding. He had begun to worry again that the thing was creeping up on him when movement in the lower canopy caught his attention.
Above the bird something had begun to slide down the trunk of a tree. It was covered in thick, black, wooly looking fur with patches of white on the chest and back. The moment it slid to a stop it leapt to a nearby branch. As it arched through the air, Max could see that it had long arms and legs that it used to latch onto its new perch with preternatural grace. Max nearly gasped when it turned to look in his direction. It had great, saucer shaped eyes the color of new leaves and its unblinking stare seemed to take in the whole forest at once.
Max ducked back behind the tree and held his breath. He waited for the creature to scream or begin jumping through the canopy in his direction. When he heard nothing but the flapping of the bird as it circled, he inched further behind the tree and crouched down with his bundle of cooked tentacles. He placed them carefully on the ground between his feet, then scratched the brightling quickly between the ears.
“Let me know if they come this way.”
Max poked at the tentacles until he found the coolest one, then pulled it apart and used his teeth to scrape the insides clean of warm, starchy mush. His mouth flooded as the greenish-white flesh hit his tongue, and he moved quickly through the others. When he had cleaned the last of them, he looked at the bare patch of dirt between his feet. Then he looked at the broken, empty tentacles laying in a pile at his side.
“They look a lot bigger when they’re trying to kill you.”
Max eased himself back to his feet.
“Let’s go find another one,” Max said, stepping over the brightling to edge his way around the massive white tree trunk.
Peeking out from behind the tree, Max could see that the bird still circled the place where the tentacle creature had fallen.
“I think we can sneak away,” Max whispered. “If we’re quiet.”
A shrill, wailing call sounded from directly above him. Max jumped, then shrank into a crouch as he looked up.
The black, wooly looking creature clung to the white bark of the tree a few feet above him and its green saucer eyes were locked on his face. Watching its small mouth tremble Max might have believed it was wailing in fear of him, but he abandoned the thought when it bared two rows of vicious looking needle teeth and hissed with such menace that Max took an involuntary stumble backward.
Resisting the urge to run, Max raised his arm and sent a fire bolt at the green-eyed thing. The wooly monster leapt sideways. While Max’s burst of flame exploded harmlessly against the white tree trunk, his target landed somewhere in the undergrowth between Max and the bird.
The bird let out a piercing cry and banked sharply in his direction. Max turned and ran.